In the past score of years Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) tools have been created; some for particular manufactured components (such as a computer chip), some for complex components which incorporate sub-assemblies of electrical components (such as printed circuit boards, computer motherboards or power supplies), and some for discrete pin-to-pin interconnections between separate electrical component circuits. Extremely powerful and elaborate tools have also been created for individual semiconductor-based, integrated-circuit chips' logic circuit design, layout, and manufacturing; similarly, powerful, three-dimensional visualization, rendering, and supportive tools for designing complex-shaped mechanical parts and assemblies have been created. Companies now focus on increasing the density and complexity of particular manufactured components to increase the value-added aspect of their business.
Most of these tools, if not all, have focused on either the logical/electrical aspect, or on the physical/analog aspect, of their subject matter. Most tools in the prior art have focused on particular components rather than the entirety of an assemblage; and most have focused on support for designing from scratch, rather than building from already-available, ‘off-the-shelf’ manufacturers' products and components.
Over the same time, manufacturers have created many different components. For example, consider the class comprising connectors which are used to link together electronic and mechanical components into a completed product. In the computer field alone there are connectors for parallel, serial, Ethernet, FireWire, SCSI, USB, DIN-9, DIN-25, and other possible connection standards, with each of these connection-standard categories further subdividing into connectors with differing lengths, pin assignments and layouts, resistances, shielding, and other properties, all on the market.
Connection is an essential part of any complex assemblage process, including and more particularly electromechanical assemblies and electronic devices (which hereafter will be referred to as “Hardware Electrical Systems”, or “HES”). For each such HES, a multiplicity of connectors bridge and connect the subordinate, disparate component parts and sub-assemblies into a greater whole. But as the density and complexity of incorporated components increase, so, too, does the complexity of their interconnections—and thus the complexity of the connectors which are required to bring them together, so that each whole HES becomes more than just an agglomeration of the parts. What used to be accomplished with simple 16-gauge wires hand-soldered into place now requires complex connectors; and what could be done with simple line drawings now requires systemic design responsive to the precise environment throughout the entirety of the physical, finished product. Connector design, alone, has become its own subordinate engineering specialty!
But connectors are only a part of the greater problem of integrating electrical and mechanical system design. (‘Mechanical’, in this sense, addresses the physical but non-electrical aspects such as dimensionality, temperature tolerance, strain/stress/flexibility, color, or other characteristics of a component. And non-electrical is meant to exclude only the intentionally electrical aspects of a component, i.e. those aspects affecting the electrical functioning by design as opposed to mishap.) For most ‘hardware’, in these days of increasingly pervasive electronics, both electrical and mechanical design aspects must be considered and resolved. This is universally true for any HES.
For any HES, both the electrical and mechanical aspects must interoperate, and both the logical and physical details must be correct. All the specific details from count, pin assignment, pin placement, pin resistance, cable length, cable flexibility, cable diameter, to each component's physical, electrical, and logical specifications—all these must be integrated in the real world, or a device will not function (at worst) or will contain unsuspected flaws or weaknesses. All these concerns must also increasingly be integrated in the symbolic design world, when a new product is proposed or considered; and success and efficiency in such is required to move from conception to design to manufacturing to market. Moreover, as companies increasingly strive to produce multiple products and manage these products' lifecycles (design, stocking, inventory, engineering change orders (“ECO”) responsive to customers' requests, version tracking), the need for supportive tools to manage the process effectively has increased.
It should be reasonably understood that any particular HES may be considered at the top level of granularity to be a single product. That product is comprised of a set of components, and both the nature of interaction and interconnection (physical and electrical) amongst the members of the set of components, and the particulars of each member's composition, must be tracked. Each member of this set of components can be viewed in turn as a sub-assembly to the entire product, comprising in its turn a set of parts and interconnections. This recursive evaluation can arbitrarily bottom out at the level where the designer of the top-level product decides it is more efficient to treat an assembly as an atomistic element or part which is more efficient to obtain as defined from an external support.
For example, one manufacturer, with less sophisticated personnel, may simply put a computer together from the motherboard, power source, cabling, shell, drive(s), peripheral-support secondary components, and superficial styling components, using nothing more complex than solder, screwdriver, and sweat. A second manufacturer may want to provide a more specialized, or at least more particularized, computer by incorporating a drive which it manufactures itself to obtain an advantage in performance, cost, or quality. A third may wish to put together its own motherboards, using a varying chipset and PCB selection depending on market availability. The first manufacturer will consider its computer to be the project, and every one of the subordinate components to be an ‘atom’ which it conjoins. The second manufacturer will also consider its computer to be the project, but will have a sub-project (or sub-assembly) for the in-house drive component. The third computer will also consider its computer to be the project, but its drive will be atomistic, while the motherboard will be a sub-assembly. Each manufacturer will want to focus its limited-resource of skilled design engineer and design management time and attention differently; none will want to bear the burden of tracking and entering excess particularity.
To keep up with the continually increasing flow of innovations, choices, and changes, while decreasing their own costs, manufacturers increasingly must reduce the cost of labor used in designing, not just manufacturing, their products. For cost reasons, most manufacturers, particularly end-product, more particularly mass-market consumer product, and most particularly consumer electronic product manufacturers, would prefer to use standardized and pre-existing components (each one representing a solution) from established vendors, over reinventing and manufacturing every component in each subassembly from scratch. This approach also greatly facilitates coordination of manufacturing over multiple products, including multiple product versions and multiple product lines.
In the existing state of the art, both Product Lifecycle Management (“PLM”) and HES design for manufacturability take place in a manual, error-prone environment. Currently the design and production engineers must collect an enormous variety and quantity of information. They must gather all the relevant details from manufacturers of the subcomponents, a time-consuming process in itself; compare and contrast amongst various candidate components and each against the design specification's constraints; and, generally, conduct a search and comparison effort for parts availability and suitability using improvised tools, memory, and both on-line and off-line catalogs. These tasks are made more difficult by the fact that some manufacturers, to prevent ready comparison, pointedly differentiate the amount and nature of the details they publish about their components; there is no global standard.
Companies need tools that support more than just the design of each HES (and its subordinate components, sub-assemblies, and sub-components). Once an HES is designed, supporting documentation for the manufacturing process must be completed, and the integrated purchase and inventory control must be supported. In order to obtain the best possible efficiency, any PLM-supportive, CAD-CAM tool for interoperative electrical and mechanical design must also integrate with existing company-wide engineering, manufacturing, and purchasing processes which are used for the subordinate assemblies that the connectors link together. There is a definite need for a tool supporting and enabling higher levels of integration, automation, and adaptation of solutions across disciplines and particular specific assemblies that make the job of designing and engineering electrical hardware systems, and managing the associated data, faster and more efficient. Furthermore, as more and more complex assemblages are being envisioned and designed, there is a need for a tool that turns ‘design and systems integration’ into real-world manufacturing results. The re-use of as many component parts, and the ability to convert vendor economies (such as volume discounts or special trade considerations favoring one particular vendor) requires a tool and approach that considers more than theoretical and engineering constraints.
For example, the design of a connector from one component (a power source) to a second (a motherboard) may involve the following steps: (1) specifying the electrical input constraints for the PCB assembly, i.e. the motherboard; (2) selecting the connector type (for the link from the power source); (3) determining the first end of the connector's gender (to the power source); (4) delving through manufacturers' catalogs and websites to find a manufacturing part number for that connector; (5) repeating step 4, but this time to find out the supplemental details such as the backshell, tolerances, pricing and availability; (6) selecting the connector's cable and shell material; (7) repeating steps 2–5 for the other end (the one linking to the motherboard; (8) checking for logical and electrical connectivity against both ends' constraints; (9) producing the assembly drawing for the design; (10) producing the Bill of Materials for the design; and, finally, (11) updating ECO and document control and versioning records—and then the design can be turned over to the manufacturing process.
This process, with appropriate variations, would be repeated for each HES and its internal assemblage of components, and for all sub-assemblies and sub-components, recursively until the bottom-level components are reached. A manufacturer wishing to be flexible will not want a tool that forces a designer to accept a uniform level for what constitutes an ‘atom’ for a particular HES design; what is needed is one where the granularity of what is ‘atomistic’ may range from an entire sub-assembly (e.g. a power source, incorporating a transformer, plug, in-board connections, and even cooling fan and heat-sink) through a complex but standard IC (or ‘Integrated Circuit’, each of which comprises a subassembly of multiple transistors, gates, resistors, and other subordinate electrical circuits), to a single but internally complex element (e.g. a coaxial cable, with its outer and inner shielding, cladding, conductive and core elements).
Going back to an earlier example, lets the gap in the prior art be shown. Connectors are used in every possible system of electromechanical equipment available on the market in every industry worldwide, yet have not had their design and manufacturing process automated; for the industry either has focused on the needs of the particular specific parts, or has considered connectors to be ‘solved’ technology and ignored the need for automation and integration with other CAD-CAM systems and processes. Industries that design, manufacture, or use connectors include the computer, electronic, telecommunication, optical, medical, biotech, industrial equipment, automotive, aircraft, oil, chemical, and plumbing industries; in fact, they may be extended to any industry where the need is for tools that can support designs and manufacturing processes that focus on the physical, logical, and economic flow path of information, control, and content for materials. Electrical and mechanical assemblies are even more widespread. Yet the tools, as described above, have generally limited themselves to one discipline, one approach, or the second. Generally, the focus of the engineering and design ‘smarts’ has been on providing tools that only support efforts involved in the design for feasibility, rather than on manufacturability; let alone on adaptation within and without the company during a product's lifecycle. Part of the problem has been the absence of universal, standardized, specification requirements across both electrical and mechanical domains. One manufacturer may simple list a part's plating as being ‘gold’; a second as being ‘gold, 15 mm’ and a third not at all—while all three use the same classification and name for that part, creating an illusion of identicality, and complicating tremendously comparison amongst manufacturers. Furthermore, there has been no uniform requirement for specificity, which has allowed a tremendous concealed variation to develop.
Even today engineering and manufacturing firms continue to incur high costs and time associated with HES designs, including the subset of connector designs, when transitioning from ‘napkin’ to ‘manufacturable’ design for anything using ‘on the shelf’ or pre-existing components. This is partly because this element of engineering has long been viewed as in essence a readily solvable problem, an application of ‘cookbook’ engineering. So hardware and electrical system design (as opposed to particular component design) remains largely a manual and multidisciplinary process, where designers and engineers are given the specifications (determined by the HES functionality) and then asked to use the information from many vendors to come up with the ‘cookbook’ solutions. Highly skilled and costly engineers then engage in a manual and time-consuming process using their memories, paper, whiteboards, spreadsheets, the Internet, and piles of vendor catalogs to first produce and organize a design, then to manually produce assembly drawings and bills of materials, and finally (as production shifts into gear) to process numerous engineering change orders as physical constraints, subcomponent dimensions, logical interconnections, physical layering for manufacturability, and other real-world constraints shift and change. This may be cookbook engineering, but it is a cookbook where neither the FDA nor any ‘consumer watch’ organization has been able to establish a universal weights, measures, qualities, and—most importantly—descriptive terminology, to which the suppliers must adhere. There is a great difference between #12 durum wheat flour, and potato flour; there is even more difference between a DIN-15 hi-lo and DIN-15 lo-hi connector end (before considering whether they are screw-attached, clamp-fixed, shielded, unshielded, etc. etc. etc.).
There also are enormous inefficiencies associated with hardware and electrical systems design and the integration into the entire manufacturing process for any complex system. The current process has great potential for errors arising from unchecked and mistaken assumptions, from data entry mistakes, or from undocumented, prior design determinations that conflict with new manufacturing requirements. There are also significant constraints on the engineers' ability to find and integrate existing design or vendor information within any company which limit the re-use of already-extant solutions. And there is no automatic or ensured coordination with other enterprise information that, properly, should influence design choices, as such enterprise information should guide the product through its lifecycle management. (For example, dropping a formerly-related vendor may set off a chain of redesign to switch ‘equivalent but not identical’ subcomponents whose pricing or availability may be dramatically altered. Or a previously-unconsidered constraint (e.g. temperature range stability) may mean the substitution of one subcomponent for another, to allow minimization of separate vendors over multiple product lines.
One problem that has arisen in the rapidly-expanding and changing manufacturing world: non-end-product manufacturers, who sell components to other manufacturers, often want to ‘lock in’ their existing customers through information and design manipulation, rather than depend solely upon the harder-to-guarantee pure price advantage. These manufacturers recognize that every specific detail for any aspect of a particular component which need not match an externally-specified standard or constraint (whether such be color, temperature tolerance range, physical dimension limit, component material, pin assignment, voltage drop over time, etc. etc.), might not be readily discoverable, or might subject to change. These non-end-product manufacturers may wish to create or sustain an appearance of differentiation, hoping that the ‘FUD factor’ (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) will keep existing customers from shifting their purchases based on a minor cost savings—because their customers cannot be certain that the new supplier's purportedly similar component will prove to be functionally equivalent. They are also depending on the reality of engineering inertia: once a component has been examined and fully evaluated by a customer, and used, it will be preferred as it represents a ‘known quality’, over an as-yet unexamined and only partially-confirmable ‘similar’ product from a competitor. For no one engineer can keep abreast of, and test, all the existing components and establish the requisite knowledge base to permit, in the light of only partial manufacturers' documentation, when “true” and when “incomplete” equivalence actually exists. One important limitation to design and manufacturing assistance programs has been the reluctance of manufacturers to provide a universal, standard description for all of their components; instead, there is a continual drive for differentiation for marketing advantage. Complexity, in this area, is the friend to the provider, not to the consumer of his products—even when the ‘consumer’ is a higher-level manufacturer. Because once a product becomes generic, its only remaining competitive arenas are price and availability.